Vikram Seth's Big Book

Published: May 2, 1993

(Page 3 of 6)

Seth admits to using actual people as the basis for his new book. "Every novelist does," he says. "But then the characters come into contact with those they would never meet in real life, and they change quite considerably." At least one character, however, is clearly recognizable: an opinionated scholar based on Dr. Ila Chatto padhyay, a family friend who had steered him toward mathematics and economics in his early academic life.

This is a book in which you must orient yourself by tracing the branches of four family trees -- the Mehras, Kapoors, Khans and Chatterjis -- printed on the endpapers. The central character, Lata, is a 19-year-old college student whose mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, takes it upon herself to find her daughter a suitable husband. The plot, as in Jane Austen, revolves around Lata and her suitors, but the richness of the book comes from the hundreds of interactions between families and friends, brought together as passing strangers or made enemies by legal, religious, musical, literary, economic and social institutions. "A Suitable Boy" bears out a truism of Indian society: that at a certain level everyone seems to know everyone else.

Unlike Dickens or the 19th-century Russian novelists, Seth has drawn his characters exclusively from the middle and upper classes. Cultural more than economic differences separate the families, with key individuals of each clan bringing them together. He doesn't object to the label "soap opera" as a description of the plot. "I used to be hooked on 'Dynasty,' " he says. "I used to sit there with my mouth open, wondering what would happen next."

The panoramic view of Indian society in the book was accidental. What he had in mind was a series of short novels, covering the period from the 50's to the 90's, rather than a doorstop about a transition in Indian history. He began with a scene between Lata and Mrs. Mehra, wrote for several months, and discovered that he didn't know enough about his characters. "I had opened the door partly wide and there were all these people walking into this huge drawing room and I didn't have anything to feed them. They were strolling around uncontrollably. It took me a long time to familiarize myself with the time, and then with the professions, activities, events -- these geographies of the mind."

To research his book, Seth spent months among old newspapers from the period, brushed up on his Urdu, visited tanneries, interviewed anyone who had frequented courtesans during the heyday of the Nawabs, before independence. The city of Brahmpur in the book is an amalgam of Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Benares, Patna and Ajodhya. ("I realized quite early on that I would run into trouble if I didn't create my own city.")

Seth is fastidious about facts, especially those pertaining to natural history. The ornithology and seasonal foliage changes in the book were checked for accuracy with various sources. (After dinner one night, he directs our taxi to a former home of his parents in New Delhi, a generous loan from the state when his mother was acting chief justice of the Delhi High Court. We patrol the grounds in the dark as he identifies each tree -- "laburnum, ashok, ficus, eucalyptus, neem" -- in a performance of his knowledge.)

To meet the source for much of his material, Seth invites me to Sunday lunch at his parents' house in Noida, a suburb across the Jumna River from New Delhi. Three stories on a small plot of land in a new development, hammers pinging rock on construction sites all around, it is the first house they have ever owned. "They are salaried people and could never afford to live in Delhi," according to Seth. Like most middle-class Indian households, however, they have a small staff of servants, one of whom answers the door and leads me to the sitting room.

Dressed in traditional kurta-pyjama -- a collarless shirt and baggy trousers -- Vikram reintroduces his parents (we had shaken hands at the recital and at a cocktail party) before leading me on a tour. Prem Seth is warm, casual, outgoing as befits one who traveled widely for his shoe company. Leila Seth, dressed in a saffron sari with a red tikka mark on her forehead, is more reserved, like her son. Half of the first floor seems devoted to her brown-spined law library, which extends from a study into the hall. The first female chief justice of the state High Court in the neighboring state of Himachal Pradesh, where they lived until retiring to Noida, she has a reputation as a singular intellect.

"We had long discussions," says his father during our vegetarian meal. "I was often amazed at the questionnaire that he had prepared for me. If I answered one way, he would come back and tell me that I had answered another way on another day."

On an upper floor shared with his younger brother, in rooms that recently belonged to his sister, Seth shows me where he finished his book. Some days he worked 16 or 17 hours, some days not at all. He began by hand, developed cramps and tried therapy ("I baked my hand, I froze my hand"), switched to a laptop, dictated to a friend and concluded again with a pen. He likes to write in bed, often after rising "at the crack of noon. I need about 10 or 11 hours. I love sleeping, singing, swimming. All things that begin with S."